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11 Pieces Of Advice To Improve Your Essay Writing Skills

Students often write different types of essays during their studying at school, college, or university. Writing even a small academic paper can be a challenging task for some people. Not everybody has natural talents for writing. Moreover, even talented students need to know some basic rules on how to write their papers to earn better grades. Here, you may learn some decent advice on how to improve your skills and write better texts.

Read the works of other people.

The best way to understand how a particular type of an academic paper should look like is to look at decent examples. Reading the texts of other students that brought high scores to their authors, you’ll learn how to better structure and style your own text.

Indicate your main idea.

Starting a paragraph, you should write about its main idea in the first sentence. Such sentences are called topic sentences. This easy method will help your readers immediately understand what to expect from each paragraph.

Use sentences of different length.

If you want to emphasize some idea, it’s better to use a short and clear sentence. If you need to explain or illustrate something, you may use longer descriptive sentences.

Place the keywords properly.

If you have a long sentence, it’s advisable to put the keywords that define the main idea of this sentence at the beginning or at the end of it.

Use different types of sentences.

To make your essay more interesting, you should use questions and commands here and there. It’s also advisable to vary sentence structures: use simple, complex, and compound sentences.

Use active voice.

If you often use the passive voice in your text, it looks boring to your readers. Use more dynamic verbs and the active voice.

Use specific words.

If you want to convey a particular message, you should use specific words that exactly show what you’re trying to say. Don’t be vague in your explanations.

Eliminate extensive words.

When checking a sentence, you should eliminate all the words that this sentence can function without.

Read aloud.

Reading your essay aloud will help you notice some stylistic mistakes and weak points of the sentences.

Proofread properly.

Pay special attention to each sentence when proofreading your final draft to make sure that everything is correct.

Acquire a dictionary.

Using some particular terms, you should be absolutely sure what they mean. Consider buying a dictionary to check all the difficult words.